Martin Walde does not produce »definitive« artworks. The traditional hierarchy of means which would imply describing a future work sketching it and then executing it is also alien to him. What is at stake for him is to approach certain themes from the different perspectives of media, setting them down with literary means or exploring them in drawings and illustrated stories and then again presenting them in a series of possible objects. He is (here appearances may be misleading) not an inventor proposing and patenting solutions but rather a visual equilibrist who announces his act but does not always carry it out. To announce something one only needs catchwords stimulating the imagination, drawings and prototypes promising more than they actually fulfill. What relates him to the inventor, the explorer, in short: the scientist, is his artistic side which this type likes to hide bashfully: fantasy and speculation.
The fact that soap is now one of his central interests, probably has to do with his very own history and childhood and with the resulting in-depth study of this fascinating product. But also other products whose inherent changes fascinate him appear: wax, silicone, cotton or plastic, foam and diverse creams. Using them as protagonists subjected to perform his physical and chemical drills, he seeks to conceive the impossible, to mark it and to make it real. Texts and short conceptual statements evoke ideas. Drawings allude to fantasies of realization, objects become protagonists of further transformations. The magic formula is »transformation«. The reconstruction of »hallucigenia«, an archaic being of which we only know the petrified skeleton, is just as much an issue as the future ecological solution of wax bottles that can be melted (Melting Bottles) as the black white-washing soap (Black Soap), in which the most diverse cleaning agents dissolve and as the uncollapsible construction of foam. The impossible is mentally tried out and thus becomes reality. Miracles become possible, the fantasitc emerges. The world is reconceived under different premisses. Notions such as decline, transformation, disappearance, loss, absence, expansion and contraction characterize these processes for which spirits and phantoms are responsible. These are the issues referred to, as well as the characteristics of the world still unknown to us. Here at the latest and not only after we saw the dragonfly in the studio we realize that Martin Walde is not the »mad scientist« but the romantic in whose world the trees begin to speak and things come to life. 